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Wooden Circus Three cans of paint sat on Levent Isik's porch for weeks in 1989, left over from attempts to spice up a worn-out Schwinn 10-speed. One day, he found a piece of scrap wood near the street and took it into his apartment, where an uncharacteristically clean paintbrush sat in the sink, and his walls stood white and bare. Outside of high school art classes and bar napkin doodling, Isik had never thought to draw or paint. But with the raw materials at his disposal and a head full of "sheer boredom and pathos," he started to paint careful lines that soon became a jester in a striped and bubbled cloak. At 29, Isik had just quit a steady job selling for a tool company in Cleveland. "I had baby hands. It was no-callous work," he says. He had also broken up with a woman he was about to be engaged to. Shredding his ties to the life he had lived for seven years, he packed up and settled in Columbus, simply because it was the next major city on Interstate 71. "I realized what I did after I left," says Isik. "I had a lot of friends there: I knew the city like the back of my hand. I was alone in Columbus - I didn't know anyone. I took that wood and leftover paint and unconsciously made the jester because that's how I felt."
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